Description:
Nathan Salsburg – Ipsa Corpora (2025)
Review:
Nathan Salsburg’s latest is a long piece full of silences. It runs on for 39 minutes, alternating cascades and rambles of acoustic folk picking with ruminative caesuras, the negative space as much a voice as the exquisitely clear string tones. You might know Salsburg from his sprightly duets with James Elkington, his sung and picked folk blues adventures, his life and artistic partnership with Joan Shelley, or his explorations of Jewish mystical traditions through the Landwerk series and the 2021 recording Psalms. Ipsa Corpora takes from all of these endeavors, leaning musically on the Takoma-style blues elements of his work, while bringing in the searching spirituality of the music he grounds in faith. The phrase “Ipsa Corpora” means “the bodies themselves” in Latin. It’s used in the law to designate a physical item, “the thing itself” rather than an abstraction. And so, let’s take the music here as its own phenomenon, not a metaphor for whatever meaning we want to put on it. The music then, is a series of interlocked compositions, some slow and thoughtful, others frolicsome and full of spark. It’s all performed by Salsburg alone on an instrument and in a room that enables clarity and resonance. In the opening few minutes, when Salsburg intersperses notes with long periods of quiet, you can hear the tones hanging on for ten seconds or more, dispersing but still present. Later, sound seven minutes in, the picking coalesces into a sunny ramble, the notes packed more closely but still as distinct and precise and haloed by aura as in the opening. The album is one long track, but it has movements, often separated from one another by an interval of the same widely spaced chords that we heard in the opening moments. It could have been divided into shorter pieces, but Salsburg chose not to do so. In his notes, he says that sonic ideas for the piece turned up at various times. They seemed, to him, like characters in a play that push forward to say their piece and then recede. To remember them, he assigned them names, often borrowed from deceased relatives, but this effort to impose a framework failed. Says Salsburg, “These arbitrary associations failed. The new pieces couldn’t correspond to the old apparitions. They were real — subjects in themselves, paradoxically, synesthetically, embodied in sound.” In other words, the thing itself. Now, do you need to know all this? Certainly not. Ipsa Corpora flows effortlessly from one musical idea to the next, some rustic, some mystic, some plain and some elaborated with filigrees. It’s all played beautifully, each note clear and meaningful, no muddle or murk, and imbued with grace. You have to clear a 40-minute space for it, but that’s a small consideration for music this light and lovely. In a world full of an endless, worthless flotsam of things, here is the thing itself, and it’s gorgeous. — dusted
Track List:
01 - Part I
02 - Part II
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk
Origin: USA 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.3.0 (UTC 2013-05-26)
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